Making games about being isolated (Knytt Stories, Untitled Story, hrmm, and OTHER kinds of stories) has become a bit of an indie games staple. But while these games ultimately boil down to platforming in really big, empty worlds with ambient music that fades between levels, JaJ’s Abandoned deftly avoids such comparison by removing any semblance of platforming from the genre. Hence, JaJ manages to create an altogether new genre — the “Mazexploratoidvania” genre.

Now granted these kinds of games have been done before — though Studio Pixel’s Ikachan (one of his last surviving indie works) only fails to meet this criteria due to its implementation of gravity of some sort (a rather clichéd game mechanic by now, to be sure) — but never has a game made me feel so isolated. Consider the fact that I spend most of my days alone in my room, listening to Ratatat and musing on the indie gaming community. Trust me, I know isolation.

Like conventional Metroidvanias, the game’s flow is ultimately determined by exploration — getting new items gives you the ability to explore new areas, and then you use the items you find there to explore even newer areas, and basically you’ll descend into the treacherous vicious circle of finding and exploring addiction, which is a lot like how I’ve constantly got to find a new fetish to arouse me in any way, which becomes normalized and thus the baseline to which I must find a new fetish — try to compare this to the games world and you’ll be pleasantly surprised, methinks.

The game starts off a bit slow, but give it bit of time and patience (just as you would the next “big” indie music album [oh the ironies of such a statement...]), and maybe you’ll find something you like. And even if you don’t like it, it’s still good to at least play it so you can pretend to like it.

Abandoned (Hi Quality Version Direct Link) (Low Quality Version Direct Link) by JaJ, 13MB and 6MB respectively

LINE1. See that big red column in the screenshot? A capital I. For Indie.

Let’s go…

Nothing lends art a false sense of credibility like black and white, and Zoglu Production’s Scrolling Survivor is without doubt indie gaming’s very own student photograph run through a filter in a cracked copy of photoshop. And to supplant the opening artistic salvo with some beefy ordinance, it’s French. Many games of our current period feature scrolling, it’s a rather passé technology, however few feature surviving, none quite so prominently as Scrolling Survivor.

Depending upon how European you are you may or may not remember the auto-scrolling stages of the little-known underground Japanese piece Sonic the Hedgehog for the Master System (though it takes aesthetic elements from the Mario series, a great irony), the main difference, and the overt basis of the game, is that the borders of the screen are permeable, and should you find yourself out of their confines for more than a few mere moments, your crudely drawn potato man meets an untimely end.

Reflecting a current hot-button political conern, the environment is your enemy — and its inhabitants, cannons, other bipedal beings, et. al, can do little but merely bump you off the screen. You are quite literally impervious to all other attack, with only your mobility and wits to triumph over the trials and tribulations you will encounter.

Now, given that your enemies can not hurt you directly, and that the environment is your only enemy, and that completing the levels more quickly and efficiently will grant you distinctions in the form of “ranks,” it is not hard to see a connection between “surviving the scrolling” and “advancing up the socio-economic ladder.”

Thusly, the future direction of our society ultimately rests in your hands, specifically your fingers that rest on the arrow keys and control, the worst key. Take control, assume social responsibility, defy the odds, survive, scroll, and Vote Republican.

Thanks…

Scrolling Survivor Demo (Direct Link) by Zoglu Productions, 1.4 MB

VillaVanilla’s Opal Night will be an episodic Flash game that will feature a system called “Adaptive long and short term, global and local gameplay and narrative“, which is incidentally the most independently pretentious and vague feature I’ve ever read about in the history of my vague and pretentious indie career. I’m jealous.

Let’s feature every game that tells you what to do or what you have done! No sane-minded individual would name their games that way. Messhof’s You Found the Grappling Hook is an example of the finest masterpiece the world has ever seen. I mean, who the hell would think of using “pee yellow” for the color of their caves? You’re not fooling anyone by calling it gold, buddy!

So here’s the setup: you’re out on an adventure to steal gold, but the denizens of the cavern you’re looting from aren’t too happy to hear about your little activity under their noses. Still, gold is what you’re after and you won’t leave without amassing a small fortune of it, or that’s what the fairy godmother told me in my sleep after the six bottles of beer I had yesterday.

I’ve got to puke now, but yeah play this “thing”. *bleurgh***

You Found the Grappling Hook by messhof, 12 MB

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Ropes are in vogue and Forgotten Sky has them in spades. Made by a team of Cornell students, Forgotten Sky is basically Bionic Commando if Bionic Commando’s Bionic Commando’s Bionic Arm was made of rope and not of metal. Basically you swing around on a rope a lot, and the rope is limp, and that in and of itself is a pretty big deal. You can also use your limp rope to pull things like crates, or to fling yourself off of deadly sawblades, or into them if you are self-loathing (and which indie game developer isn’t?).

The story involves a guy named Caelum, who has a rope gun and a “katana-hoe.” I’d like to tell you more about the story, but doing so would marginalize the fact that there is a “katana-hoe” in the game, which is exactly what it sounds like.

This game is so indie not even IndieGames.com has written about it. Indie as hell.

Forgotten Sky by The Dynamite Bananas, 14 MB